Something you may have picked up on during the four years Donald Trump was in office was that he loathed the free press and, if he’d gotten a second term, probably would have made it illegal for news organizations to publish anything less than the glowiest of glowing stories about him and how he was the greatest president to ever live. He regularly attacked reporters, called the media “the enemy of the people,” and in 2019 got so angry about journalists putting out stories based on facts that he ordered federal agencies not to renew their subscriptions to The Washington Post and The New York Times. So while it’s not entirely surprising to learn that his administration spied on reporters, it is deeply chilling nevertheless.
On Thursday night, it emerged that Trump’s Justice Department had obtained CNN reporter Barbara Starr’s email and phone records covering a period of two months between June and July 2017. In a letter informing her of the secret surveillance, Joe Biden’s DOJ listed phone numbers for Starr’s Pentagon extension, her home and cell numbers, the CNN Pentagon booth phone number, and her work and personal email accounts. It’s not clear why the Trump administration wanted to know who Starr was corresponding with; according to CNN, during the timeframe the letter listed, Starr reported on U.S. military options in North Korea, as well as stories on Afghanistan and Syria. In a statement, CNN president Jeff Zucker said the network “strongly condemns the secret collection of any aspect of a journalist's correspondence, which is clearly protected by the First Amendment,” adding, “we are asking for an immediate meeting with the Justice Department for an explanation.”
The Starr revelation comes just weeks after it was reported that three Washington Post reporters who covered the FBI’s Russia investigation had their phone records obtained by Trump’s DOJ, which followed the 2018 disclosure from the DOJ that it had obtained email and phone communications of a reporter for Politico, BuzzFeed, and The New York Times who had written articles about Russia. Meanwhile, earlier this week court filings showed that the DOJ had subpoenaed Twitter in November 2020 in an attempt to learn the identity of the person behind a parody account that criticized Rep. Devin Nunes, a major Trump ally.
“Now for the second time in just about as many weeks we’ve seen these disclosures that the DOJ has gone about obtaining records without advance notice to the journalist or to the news organization to give the reporter a chance to contest what DOJ is seeking,” Bruce Brown, the executive director for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told CNN. “Twice now we’ve seen in the prior administration that toward the end of their time in office they used this route to intrude into the very heart of what newsgathering is about. It’s deeply disconcerting and the new team at DOJ has a real imperative in front of it now to very quickly explain to these newsrooms, and to press freedom advocates, what happened and how did it happen, and why did it happen and what they can do to ensure in this administration and future administrations this doesn’t happen again.”
After taking office in 2017, Trump started fuming about leaks from inside the government, and several months later attacked then Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not cracking down on them. The month after the chiding, Sessions announced that the Department of Justice was “reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas.”
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